London has been battered by 50mph winds that have felled trees and caused travel chaos. Powerful gusts swept across the capital as the Met Office issued a yellow "be aware" weather alert for most of the country.

Bankers stood shoulder-to-shoulder at the Swiss ski resort of Davos to try to prevent a scatter-gun approach to new financial regulation by different countries.

They united against Barack Obama's threat to break up banks and Gordon Brown's growing enthusiasm for a Tobin tax on all financial market transactions.

The Standard Chartered chief executive, Peter Sands, warned against over-regulating the private sector and stifling economic recovery. "The stakes are very high," he said. "If we get it wrong in one dimension, we will end up stifling growth. If we get it wrong in the other dimension we end up with another crisis.

"The idea that banking is getting back to business as usual is a misunderstanding. Banking has fundamentally changed. There is an acceptance that things will have to continue to change."

Barclays Capital boss Bob Diamond warned that threats from the US President and moves from the Prime Minister such as the bankers' bonus tax were damaging. "This is a time when isolated actions in the US and UK are not beneficial," he said. "Without risk we do not have a banking industry. Having banks willing to take risks, particularly cross-border risk is essential to economics."

Financiers are keen to see a slower approach to new regulation rather than knee-jerk reactions from individual countries.

"We could all be losers in the end if we don't have an efficient market in place any more," Deutsche Bank boss Josef Ackermann said at the World Economic Forum.

Moves to limit bank size were misguided, and risked ending up with small players, ill-equipped to cater to the needs of global trade, he said. He added: "I think you wouldn't have better, more resilient and more efficient markets."

But Jaime Caruana of the Bank of International Settlements told financiers they could not leave it entirely to regulators to fix things. He said: "Regulators are conscious there is a balance between quality of management and regulation. Regulation is a very important part of the solution, but there is an important part that comes from the private sector — and it is really that — quality of management."